Before we can really talk about how to choose a blog name, you need to decide what your blog will be about. I know that sounds obvious, but it’s easier said than done. When starting out, I recommend you blog about two topics – an essential oil niche and a niche related to essential oils.

The name you choose needs to incorporate both of those niches, while leaving the door open for other possible topics you want to add later. PLUS, it has to actually be available.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take your time picking out a name. You’re going to be using this name over and over, hopefully for years to come and you want it to be something that will stand the test of time. I can’t tell you how many bloggers I know who wish they could change their blog name, but it is way too much work to change it down the road. Trust me. You don’t want to go down that road.

Please note that this is step #7 in my FREE How to Sell doTERRA Online Training. Click here to see the complete training and complete steps 1-6.

What Will You Put on Your Blog?

The essential oil niche section

The essential oil section of your blog should be about a niche. You need to specialize in something. You won’t be able to compete with the big guys and you’ll get spread way too thin if you try to blog about everything under the sun that has to do with essential oils. Pick a subject that you feel like you could eventually write about 100 posts and get in to a lot of depth and really cover the subject and be seen as an expert in that subject by your readers and by Google.

Don’t get overwhelmed thinking you have to write 100 articles. You don’t have to write 100 articles right away. You don’t have to write 100 articles ever if you don’t want to. doTERRA has tons of resources to make it easy. Once you’re a doTERRA certified website, you can actually use any of their images for free, so you don’t have to totally come up with everything from scratch if you don’t want to.

Some quick ideas of essential oil niches that come to mind could be:

Essential oils for parents, pets, overworked moms, athletes, cleaning recipes, diffuser blends, make and takes, class ideas or cooking with essential oils

See how each of these ideas are broad enough to have plenty to write about and appeal to a wide enough audience, but specific enough to not be completely overwhelming? (If only I could have taken this training myself years ago . . .)

Once you have your idea, see if it passes this test. Can you answer yes to all three of these questions?:

• Do I have some basic knowledge in this subject and/or a desire to spend the time to learn a lot more about it?
• Do I have enough passion about the subject to write 100 blog posts about it?
• Is there enough demand for the subject and low competition?

How do you know if there is high demand and low competition? The best free way I know to look this up is to use Google Chrome and install the SEOQuake extension. Then go to Google and search for the term you think someone would search for on Google. Say, “toddler sleep” (which I know is totally not something you would write a whole section of a blog about, but it’s a subject on my mind right now) and it says the volume is 3,600/mo but the competition is 0.94 out of 1.

So quite a few people search for it, but it has high competition. So scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see a list of phrases that are similar they recommend. “how to get a toddler to sleep at night” has 90 searches but only .19 competition. But when you paste that in Google, the option for “how to get toddler to sleep through the night” drops down from the search bar and it has volume of 590/mo with competition of .12. Winner-winner.

The niche related to essential oils section

Now it’s time to pick one other niche on a completely different subject that would attract the kind of readers that may eventually be attracted to doTERRA. This would also be the kind of niche subject you could write about 100 articles about. Think about things like exercise, healthy eating, healthy living, self-improvement, working from home and green living.

Why? This will help bring in more readers that may eventually sign up for doTERRA, but more importantly, another income stream.

This subject should be able to pass all three questions mentioned above. You don’t even have to write about this subject to begin with, but you want to keep it in mind when choose your blog name.

Name Guidelines

Take your time picking out a name. It’s really important. Consider lots of names and ask people what they think. Make sure you LOVE it cause you’ll be stuck with it forever. I’ve found that blogs with a narrower focus are a lot easier to handle and do well because your fans know what they are going to get.

You’ll want to have many ideas for a domain name. There are a lot of websites and many of your ideas may be taken already. Here are some good tips for how to choose a blog name:

• Don’t use the word doTERRA or the name of any of their products in the name
• Make it easy to spell and say – try saying it to someone who hasn’t heard the name before and see if they can spell it
• Don’t include numbers, obscure terms, confusing strings of words or hyphens
• Use .com if possible – they hands down do the best on Google and carry the most credibility by far
• Be creative, try a phrase if you can’t find a name
• Keep it short – If nothing else, it takes less time for you and a reader to type. But it also makes it easier on places like Pinterest, where there is a 15 character limit on your profile name.
• Consider using keywords – my blog Best Essential Oils is an example of this. This is a phrase someone would search for in Google. There are pros and cons to this. The pro to this is if I can ever get my blog name to rank for the phrase, it should do well. The con is that if you search Google for my blog name, I don’t come up until #20. Plus, blog names with keywords are usually not available because people buy them and hold on to them waiting for desperate people to buy them.
• Use your name if you can’t think of anything – the good thing about this is you are really flexible about what your blog is about. The problem is that it’s not evident from your blog name what your blog is about.
• Make it something that people will understand – write the name out and have several people read it back to you and make sure you don’t accidentally spell something you didn’t mean to spell . . .
• Use a thesaurus to look up words similar to a word you like that’s taken
• Use Panabee to get all sorts of ideas and see what’s available and all sorts of variations on what you’re thinking
• See if the name is available on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. It may help you decide between two names.

Once you have brainstormed a list of possibilities, go here to get started setting up the blog and to see if the name is available.